Emotionally thrilling…

Director Nishikant Kamath displayed his fine story telling sense in the form of a Marathi movie ‘Dombivili Fast’. He ventured into Hindi cinema with an unusual but very hard hitting film ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’. This movie portrayed the fine skills of Nishikant as a director. Though, he got mass recognition only after delivering hits like ‘Force’ and ‘Drishyam’. These movies despite of being highly commercially successful, failed to come close to the originality and intensity level of ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’. Thus, right from the first look of his latest film ‘Madaari’, one gets the feeling of witnessing something simple yet, powerful like ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’. So let’s find out, whether ‘Madaari’ will manage to give us one more film with great intensity or might be a weak attempt by the director made only to clean his image after delivering a disaster film like ‘Rocky Handsome’.

‘Madaari’ is a story of Rohan (Vishesh Bhansal), a seven year old son of India’s home minister (Tushar Dalvi). One day Rohan gets kidnapped by a mysterious man (Irrfan Khan). The home minister appoints their best Officer Nachiket Verma (Jimmy Shergil) to find Rohan but, in a secretive manner. The kidnapper does not want any ransom, all he wants is to find out about a tragic incident which was the end result of a high level corruption. What happens next is what the entire film is all about.

The story has lots of similarities with several films like ‘A Wednesday’, ‘Andha Yudh’, ‘Gabbar’, ‘Te3n’ and many more. It’s something which we have seen several times, making it highly predictable. But, it’s the brilliant screenplay which makes this movie totally gripping and emotionally attached. The scenes are wonderfully woven with lots of emotions in it. The movie consists of some fine scenes likeIrrfan’s first conversation with Vishesh followed by their journey in the bus, Irrfan’s phone call, Irrfan’s interactive scenes with Vishesh, Irrfan’s conference call with Jimmy followed by making Vishesh understand in the hospital, the whole flashback track reveling the past life of Irrfan, Irrfan’s argument on phone over government followed by the finale part where he interrogates all the culprits and many more. The scene featuring Irrfan crying in the hospital is one of his finest performed scene till date and will end up giving you goose bumps. Though, the second half has been stretched a bit along with bit unconvincing climax part. If the finale part would have not been so predictable, it would have managed to leave a hard-hitting impact on its viewers mind. The dialogues are superb and goes well with the flow of the film. The cinematography is of top notch. The movie needed bit trimming in both the parts of the film.

There is not much scope for music in this movie but ‘Masoom Sa’ ends up as additional screenplay in the film. It highly connects you on the emotional level and does full justice to its placement in the film.

Director Nishikant Kamat ends up giving a good film in lines of his best work ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’. He keeps it nail biting and connects the high level emotional drama with high octane thriller. It’s only that the story is predictable and has very less amount of freshness factor attached to it. Though, he manages to extract some mind-blowing performances from Irrfan and Vishesh. Also, the finale needed to be more hard-hitting, failing to which the impact of the film gets diluted.

Irrfan Khan is fabulous in this movie. He delivers one of his best performance in ‘Madaari’. He highly excels in the emotional scenes and steals the thunder in the dramatic ones. You just cannot take away your eyes from his brilliant performance. Vishesh Bhansal is cute and performs perfectly as per his character. His scenes with Irrfan are the main highlight of the film. Tushar Dalvi, Jimmy Shergil, Nitesh Pandey and others lend good support.

So on overall basis, ‘Madaari’ is agood emotionally thrilling film, with some fantastic performances attached to it. It’s only that the story is bit stale and predictable, failing to which the movie could have ended up as one of finest film from recent times.